


Recalibration

by lourdemaitremetallique



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - No Band, Codependency, Cyborgs, Future Fic, M/M, Robot/Human Relationships, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 11:20:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3690312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lourdemaitremetallique/pseuds/lourdemaitremetallique
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You recalibrated my wiring."<br/>"Pete, stop."<br/>"You recalibrated my wiring. You recalibrated my wiring. You recalibrated my wiring. You recalibrated my wiring. You recalibrated my wiring. You..."<br/>With every reiteration, Patrick's heart broke a little more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recalibration

> "Here I am, the only living boy in Chicago. Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where."  _-_ A slightly edited version of Simon & Garfunkel's _"The Only Living Boy in New York"_

All Patrick had now was Pete.

Peter LKW Model 3, to be exact. Designed to look, sound, feel, and even taste like a real person. He was intended to serve his owners with everything concerning babysitting to changing lightbulbs and created by Mau5Tech, the leading brand in all robotic and biomechanic commercial fields.

Patrick had to say, while the wiring and circuitry was horrifically outdated, whoever made Pete did a good job with the physical aspect considering how long ago he was put together. With bronze skin, black hair, and eyes the color of Jack Daniel's whiskey, he looked so undeniably real it was hard to remember it could only be synthetic skin and metal bones. And when he opened his mouth, while the voice was human, it was empty of all emotion. That's what happens when your robot is outdated by about seventeen years; they don't come with all the fancy configurations where there's an emotional replicator that can at least  _fake_  some happiness or anger here and there.

Oh no, Pete was an old model.

Case in point: An icy Saturday morning in January.

"Good morning, Mr. Stumph."

"Fuck you."

"'Fuck you' is not a socially acceptable response to 'Good morning'. Please try again."

Patrick groaned, smashing the pillow over his face in an attempt to block out the white winter sunlight. "Fuck off."

"'Fuck off' is not a socially acceptable response to 'Good morning'. Plea-"

"Good morning, Peter LKW Model 3." Some days, Patrick would keep the charade of improper responses up for a good hour or more, usually ended by Pete short-circuiting or Patrick summoning some motivation to roll out of bed. Others, it was exhausting to merely talk for such a long period of time.

Today was the latter.

"Do we have stuff for cereal?" Patrick asked with a yawn, stretching and wrapping himself tightly in a fleece blanket.

"You have zero jugs of milk, zero cereal boxes, zero proper utensils-"

"You could have just said 'No'," Patrick bitterly intoned.

"-and zero dollars," Pete finished. "It is advised that you get a job to receive money so that you can get materials for your sustenance."

Stumbling out of bed with his blanket, Patrick pushed past Pete and out the bedroom door. His breath was visible in the frigid air.

"I'd get a job if anyone wanted to hire the son of two wanted revolutionaries. Do you understand how hard it is to get a job when both your mom  _and_ your dad are wanted by the state for trying to start an artistic revolution in the middle of a scientific age where music and everything with it is considered impractical and idiotic?" Patrick paced around the second room of the two-room apartment, blanket trailing behind like a cape. "On top of that, I'm totally skill-deprived with anything they'd consider useful. I can play any musical instrument just great but that would get me arrested, and then where would  _you_ be, Pete? Huh? You're so outdated they'd probably melt you down for scrap."

Pete blinked twice like he always did when Patrick started talking about things that weren't in his programming - in short, nearly everything. Finally, once his circuitry singled out something it understood, he said, "I prefer to be called Peter LKW Model 3, thank you."

"And I want a toilet seat made out of gold, baby, but that's just not how it works." Patrick stared at the slightly moldy loaf of bread, which was unfortunately the lone food left in the house. After a moment of consideration, he ripped open the bag and selected the least moldy slice, chewing it morosely.

"How can I serve you?" Pete inquired, standing a few feet away. It was his default phrase when he didn't know what to do.

Patrick took a deep breath, resting his chin in his hand. "Find me a job. Find some money. Find me a friend. Upgrade yourself. Fix the heater." He shrugged. "Leave me alone, Pete. I'm tired."

Pete didn't leave, and it took Patrick a second to realize why. "You want me to say the official fucking thing, don't you? Fine. I do not need your service in my personal area."

Pete left, locking the front door behind him. As to what of the tasks Patrick had assigned him to do he was going off to complete was unknown, but it would keep him busy.

Patrick finished his bread. As always, his mind was floating with a melody. It had kind of this, "Duh duh duh duh-duh, duh duh-duh duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh duh..." His brain couldn't do it justice. His fingers itched to get to an instrument. Guitar, drums, synth, it didn't matter. Creativity demands an outlet.

He still distinctly remembered his dad teaching him how to play drums, his mom laughing when he tried to wrap his small arms around the guitar and becoming so severely unbalanced that he fell with flailing limbs to the floor. He remembered his dad saying, "Music is the universe saying, 'You're alive'." He remembered watching TV and seeing his dad on the screen. He remembered his dad being interviewed as a representative of Mau5Tech. He remembered his dad telling the whole art-hating world through that microphone that, "Robotics and music are so similar in the ways they connect. A culture cannot live without music." He remembered his parents' worried faces as they packed their suitcases and told Patrick "We're leaving you with Peter for just a few days. We'll be back soon."

The next time Patrick saw them was on their wanted posters put up around the city. He had been eight years old.

Unconsciously, Patrick started tapping a beat with his fingertips on the greasy plastic counter top. It was the only sound reverberating in the otherwise empty apartment.

It was a soul-sucking, hollow silence, the type that wells up in your gut and makes your eyes haze over and your hands twitch with an acidic energy that bites when it's released. The freezing temperature did nothing to reduce the vengeance of the silence. His loneliness only intensified it.

Pete was like some sadistic torture, like Tantalus in the Underworld. Able to look upon but never engage. Pete looked and felt so very human from the outside yet his insides were a metal construction mass-produced by an uncaring over-glorified machine shop. He was the closest thing Patrick had to a friend yet the farthest away. A servant. A metal plaything. An "it". Incapable of producing the simplest of emotions. Patrick could just never bring himself to throw Pete away.

"Robotics and music are so similar..." Patrick murmured this to himself slowly, savoring his dad's words from eleven years ago. "Robotics and music..."

Pete might be hopelessly outdated. He might be in bad shape in the emotions department. He might be a friendless thing with no hope of a future.

No different than Patrick himself, to be honest.

What did he have to lose at this point? An almost completely useless robot? A few hours of his miserable life? Brain energy that could have been expended wishing for different times?

How hard could it be? If music and robotics had any similarities whatsoever, Patrick could probably figure something out.

What the hell?

He was going to recalibrate Pete.

*

"This is not an advisable idea," Pete said, keeping his distance from Patrick.

Pete had returned with some news (no; he couldn't find Patrick a job, no; he couldn't find money, no; he could not find Patrick a friend, no; he could not upgrade himself, and no; he could not fix the heater) and had responded to Patrick's idea with extreme repugnance. Patrick had never seen him act like this. Never had Pete displayed such a sense of alarm in his flat voice.

"It will serve me," Patrick added helpfully, which usually worked whenever Pete acted up (a rare occurrence). "It will help me get better.:

"This is not an advisable idea," Pete repeated.

Patrick gave an exasperated sigh. "Pete. Stop it. Just let me try."

"I am not wired to be recalibrated by anyone other than a Mau5Tech official."

" _Pete_."

"I prefer to be called Peter LKW Model 3, thank you."

It was the most passive-aggressive "thank you" to ever be spoken by someone with no emotions.

"If I call you Peter LKW Model 3 will you let me try?"

"I am not wired to be recalibrated by anyone other than a Mau5Tech official."

Patrick lunged for Pete who darted nimbly away, robotic limbs working smoother than sleep-deprived malnourished human ones. The human in question grunted, irritated by how this was going. Resistance from Pete was not what he expected.

"Pete, I need  _someone_. I can't be alone anymore."

"Find a human who will fit your needs," Pete replied flatly. "LKW models are not intended for emotional reproduction. If you prefer the company of robots to humans, please select a different robot from the Mau5Tech catalog, such as a LoveBot or a Parental Stand-In model." He sounded like he was reciting from a commercial.

He had never felt less real. He was an it. An it.

Patrick was stupid to think that he could try and turn an it into a friend. Into a person. He didn't know what to do. He was out of bright ideas.

"Leave me alone, Pete," he said, fighting to keep his voice steady. "I do not need your service." And with that, he spun on his heel and left.

As soon as he was out the door, he started running. He never ran. Never had a need to. But his feet seemed to move of their own accord, fighting to get away from his body, from the silence, the loneliness, the last drag of life in a cigarette that had never been lit.

It was noon, and the streets were populated with people on lunch break. Patrick ducked into an alley to get away from them, keeping the pace. The air was cold and chilled his lungs as he sucked in huge gulps of oxygen. He didn't know where he was going. He was just...running.

Of course, he couldn't keep it up for long. His body couldn't sustain it. After the initial novelty wore off, he slowed to a walk, drawing in shuddering breaths. Whatever tears that fell had either frozen on his face or been whipped off during his sprint.

He had no idea where he was. The alley despite the sun was dark due to a patchwork quilt of tarps, hanging laundry, and metal overhangs. The ground was freckled with broken glass and bits of garbage. Wherever he was, it was deep in the maze of alleys. But distantly he could hear sound.

Sound he knew so very, very well.

The sound of a guitar.

Turning the corner, he found the source: A human man with a cloud-like structure of curly brown hair, scruffy from apparent lack of access to a razor, playing a simple riff on a black and chestnut brown electric guitar hooked up to an amp that was the definition of "shitty". The chords sounded like melodic nails on a chalkboard, a little off-key with way too much overdrive.

It was the most beautiful sound Patrick had ever heard.

The guitarist was tucked away underneath a sheet metal lean-to atop a grungy black leather stool in a small circle of other lean-tos made out of similarly distressed materials. Patrick tried to hide himself away but the mystery man appeared to have excellent hearing even over the melodic nails on the chalkboard and stopped playing, looking up and directly at Patrick. Surprisingly, his face broke out into a smile.

"You're the guy Ray said was coming, right?" He set down his guitar gently and strode over to Patrick. "I'm Joe. Joe Trohman." He stuck out his hand, waiting for Patrick to shake it.

Patrick had never heard of a guy named Ray in his entire life, but any chance to become friends with this guitarist was a good one. Truth be damned. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm that guy that...Ray told you about. I'm Patrick."

Joe shook his hand firmly and then gave Patrick a quizzical look. "Wasn't Ray supposed to bring you here?"

"He was working on something," Patrick found himself lying. "Um, nice guitar."

Joe's entire face lit up. "I know, right? An original from before the scientific age. Bought it off the black market. Tyler always has the best stuff." He shook his head. "Anyways, do you want me to show you around until Ray gets back? Introduce you to everybody?"

"I could use a tour," Patrick replied evasively. "I haven't met anybody except for, you know, Ray." The jig was going to be up when this Ray guy came back and realized that Patrick was not in fact the right person, but until then he was going to use every opportunity he had to be around music.

Joe lead Patrick farther down the alley. Leaning against the wall was a young girl with bright red hair and a cut on her chin. She had a tough survivor look about her but a mischievous glint in her eye.

"New recruit?" She asked Joe before anything else could be said.

Joe nodded, and the girl smiled.

"I'm Hayley." She introduced herself with a hug, which was a little shocking considering Patrick didn't have much physical contact. "I'm the one girl but if you grab my ass I'll mess you up so bad you can't move your face." She cocked her head like a puppy, sweet as sugar despite the violence of her statement. "Got it, bub?" Her smile widened.

Patrick wanted to perhaps comment that the last person to say "bub" was Wolverine in 1962 but they were already moving on to the next person. They started to blur after a while. Andy, a quiet man almost completely covered in tattoos. Brendon, a young boy with an awkward haircut almost completely covered in glitter. Frank, another kid covered in tattoos who was about the same height as Patrick (fuckin' short feet and fuckin' short inches). Mikey, a lanky twenty-something who took up an entire section of the alley just with his long legs. Gerard, the slack-mouthed brother of Mikey who apparently had inked up nearly everyone in whatever this underground group was. Lindsey. Billie. Jeremy. Ryan. Jared.

More people than Patrick had ever known in his entire life. For the first time in a while, he was smiling.

Until Joe cheerfully said, "Ray's back!" and Patrick turned to see a half-Puerto Rican man standing there, looking confused.

Patrick smiled weakly.

Ray frowned.

**Author's Note:**

> Please comment if you enjoyed - it can be anything from praise to criticism, grammar corrections to wild plot theories. All welcome!


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